The Gadgets Page

I saw this month’s Reader’s Digest and my blood boiled to the surface. The headline screamed in big red letters:

Is Your Child Sexting?

Worse still, the headline was photoshopped onto an iPhone, as if it were the iPhone’s fault.

I’m pretty sick of the fear mongering that EVERY avenue of Old Media is using to make technology the bad guy. Blaming a cell phone for sexual texts between teenagers is like blaming pencils for sexy notes passed between teenagers. The fact that some teenagers are obsessed with sex has NOTHING to do with cell phones or SMS messaging. Unlike most adults, I REMEMBER what it was like to be a teenager. All I could think about was sex all the time. That wasn’t my Trapper Keeper’s fault. It wasn’t my Rubik’s Cube’s fault. Blaming the cell phone for sexual behavior among teens is just shoddy reporting and fear mongering. Bad form, Reader’s Digest, bad form.

I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything more from Reader’s Digest. Ever since its inception, it has pandered to old people. With jokes and quotes from a nearly extinct era, it won’t be long before Reader’s Digest becomes extinct as well. And when they do, they’ll probably blame it on cell phones.

I switched over to a Mac a little over two years ago. I have used iCal for that long and it has always bugged me that the calendar didn’t show my holidays. Since computers are used all over the world, it’s a little egocentric for me to expect the built in calendar program to have U.S. holidays, but I had no idea how to get the holidays into my calendar without putting them in myself.

Fortunately, there IS a way. When you’re in iCal, you choose Calendar and then Subscribe. It will ask for a URL to subscribe to. Finding the appropriate calendar for your country is DIFFICULT, so I looked at our traffic and found the calendars for the top five countries that access The Gadgets Page:

• Apple – US Holiday Calendar
• Apple – United Kingdom Holiday Calendar
• Apple – Canadian Holiday Calendar
• Apple – Australian Holiday Calendar – New South Wales (NSW)
• Apple – German Holiday Calendar

Once you’ve subscribed to a calendar, all your holidays are there for you. If there is a holiday that is continually moved with no rhyme nor reason (like the Daylight Savings fiasco in the U.S.), then you might want to have your calendar check for updates. To do that, highlight the calendar, right click on it and choose Get Info. Once you’re there, choose Auto-Refresh and change the setting appropriately.

I thought that I could live without having the U.S. Holidays on my iCal until last year when I scheduled a geek event on Easter weekend. It wasn’t until it was too late that I realized that we wouldn’t have anyone attend because of the overlooked holiday. If the lack of holidays on iCal had caused you similar troubles, you can now add your country’s holiday to your calendar.

Home & Garden Television have a list of gardening gadgets that might make yardwork a little easier this year.

• Enabling Garden Tools and Other Cool Gadgets : Home Improvement : Home & Garden Television

Here are a few of their recommendations here:

• Pot Lifter: Make moving your potted plants easier with the pot lifter.

• Ergonomic hand tools: A set of tools that work with your body better than the old style of hand tools.

• Ratchet-driving pruning tools: Prune your bushes and trees with three times the strength.

• Garden knife: Cut, weed and dig with this tool.

• Grip tape: Replace the grip on your worn out tools. Wrap your gardening tool handles with this tape to prevent blisters on your hands.

• Gardener’s pouch: Carry all of your tools with you while you garden.

• Multi-purpose nozzle: Better water nozzle for your hose.

• Faux wasp nest: Fake out wasps and yellow jackets to build a nest somewhere else.

There are so many garden gadgets on the market today to help make keeping your property looking good with less strain on yourself. Get out and enjoy your yard today!

I absolutely LOVE this little video clip of what fashion designers thought we were going to be wearing in the year 2000.

The most gadgety outfit is the one for the male. Here is what he is wearing:

As for him, if he matters at all, there won’t be any shaving, colors, ties or pockets. He’ll be fitted with a telephone, radio and containers for coins, keys and candy for cuties.

They actually got this one right. Ties are a rarity, except in the business world. Every guy now has a cell phone in his pocket, along with an iPod. The belt pack for money, keys and candy hasn’t really caught on yet because fashion designers are still giving men pockets to put them in.

I love to see how different our vision of the future is to what it eventually becomes.